A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (29 page)

The simple truth is that a car is a luxury, just yesterday unthinkable for a pipe fitter at Scania-Vabis and a seamstress at Tornvall’s, but in the new life in the new world, so many things that were unthinkable only yesterday are not anymore.

The car becomes a part of the Project in the same way as the plans for a self-built house in Vibergen and citizenship.

On May 7, 1954, the two of you become Swedish citizens.

The clearest indication that I overestimate the Place’s importance to the Project is that for quite some time, you continue to consider leaving it and moving on. Many of the people who contribute to the confusion of languages around our blanket on the sands of Havsbadet in the first years do what the express trains do, they make only a brief stop and then move on. Some cross the bridge to Stockholm once that route is opened to them, but most move on to begin their lives anew in another world. The other worlds are called Israel and America,
Jisroel unt Amejrika
. The Wyszogrodzki family, who live in the apartment block opposite ours on the rowanberry avenue, move on to Israel, where one no longer has to travel illegally by freighter. Moniek Wyszogrodzki is a pastry cook and a racing cyclist and my godfather. In Jewish tradition, the duty of the godfather or
sandak
is to hold the child’s head at the circumcision ceremony, which takes place when I am eight days old. My image of Moniek Wyszogrodzki is formed much later, when he’s a pastry cook and a racing cyclist in Israel, living with Mania and four daughters in a lovely house on the slopes of Mount Carmel, looking out over Haifa Bay and the gold-glittering Bahá′i Shrine. Moniek, now Moshe, Wyszogrodzki has red hair, a freckled face, and gray-blue eyes that radiate the energy and will of a competitive personality. Mania bears the physical marks of the road to and from Auschwitz, a lined face and gaps in her teeth, but not Moshe. Moshe lives by the cycling theorem: if you don’t keep pedaling, you fall off. In Södertälje, he’s a member of the Amateur Cycling Club.

Much later I realize that some of his energy and will also benefits you. Besides holding my head steady during circumcision, he also has a hand in the housing miracle, the little one-room apartment with the window facing the railroad tracks in the house across from the bakery.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Wyszogrodzki family’s departure from Södertälje prompts an article in the local paper. It’s December 17, 1949, and the article makes the front page, and it’s the result of Moniek Wyszogrodzki energetically and on his own initiative striding into the newspaper office and requesting to express, through the paper, “his gratitude to Södertälje for the hospitality he and members of his family have enjoyed.” In particular he wants to thank his friends in the Amateur Cycling Club. The article reveals that the Wyszogrodzki family has already departed by train for Malmö, from where they will fly to Marseille and continue to Haifa by boat, and that they have left Södertälje together with “the tailor Adam Glusman [sic] and his wife Polla.” It’s obvious from the article that the writer has difficulties in fully comprehending Moniek Wyszogrodzki’s story about his road to Södertälje, and I don’t think it’s due to a confusion of languages. I rather think it’s a certain rigidity inherent in the journalistic language of the day that manifests itself here. In any event, it’s a contemporary historical document, and I’ll let it speak for itself:

This is the only article I can find in the local paper about the temporary community of survivors in Södertälje, apart from the one about the confusion of languages on the sands of
Havsbadet. Within a few years, virtually the whole community has moved on. The majority are women from Bergen-Belsen or Ravensbrück, who have come to Södertälje to make clothes at the Tornvall garment factory, where the yearly staff turnover is 100 percent. Many of them live at Pension Fridhem, which is a large, privately owned, red-painted wooden house at a walking distance from the factory. There are pensions where people stay to rest, and there are pensions, such as Friden in Alingsås and Fridhem in Södertälje, where people stay to work.

One of the residents at Pension Fridhem is Auntie Ilonka, who comes from Bergen-Belsen via the aliens’ camp at Kummelnäs, outside Stockholm, where on September 20, 1945, she’s declared fit and “ready to be sent to work.” A year later she marries Uncle Birger from Sundsvall and changes her surname from Hellman to Sundberg and moves from Pension Fridhem to a cold-water apartment with a dry privy in the yard, not far from the big pharmaceutical factory, and some years after that to a fully modern flat in the newly built, eight-story apartment house at the other end of the rowanberry avenue. Uncle Birger works at the truck factory and earns money on the side as an insurance salesman, and Auntie Ilonka soon stops sewing for Tornvall’s and opens a tobacconist’s shop in a red-brick apartment building, and as far as I can tell they’re an ill-matched and happy couple. Their marriage is childless, but in their home I’m their child. It’s a fragile home, full of glittering china and glass figurines, crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, embroidered lace cloths on the tables, and sets of hardback novels in matching bindings on the bookshelves. The tables are laid with thin, gold-edged china cups and saucers with elegant floral patterns, lemonade glasses with drinking straws, and serving plates in nickel silver filled with homemade cakes, buns, and Swiss
rolls. Auntie Ilonka’s deep love of children often expresses itself in highly calorific forms. Their home is also one of the first to boast a radio gramophone of dark mahogany, and at the earliest possible instant, a piece of furniture combining the radio gramophone with a television. When the television broadcasts live matches from the Stockholm World Cup in 1958, we put the radio commentary on. No one can stand the silence on TV. There has to be that constant radio blare, otherwise nothing can really be happening, can it? Auntie Ilonka has glittering black eyes and a gold tooth that glints when she laughs, and her Swedish sings with a different lilt from yours. There’s a Polish lilt and a Hungarian lilt, and I grow up to the sound of them both. Uncle Birger speaks a northern Swedish dialect, and the dishes served in their kitchen are somehow northern as well, often lingonberries. If Auntie Ilonka has brought any dishes from her home in the previous world, I don’t remember them. What I remember is meatballs with cream sauce and lingonberries. And the cakes. And Uncle Birger’s northern lilt as he says my name. There’s no need for you to say good-bye to Auntie Ilonka, or to Auntie Ethel who marries Uncle Sven, Birger’s brother, or to Uncle Miklós and Auntie Elisabeth, who live across the railroad bridge and are staying on here for roughly the same reasons as you are.

And that’s about the size it remains, the refugee colony of Jewish survivors in Södertälje; most people move on. From America come shiny photographs of flourishing babies in bulbous baby carriages, from Israel thin blue aerograms with tightly written sentences on every folded flap of the single sheet. When I tear off the stamps, they leave holes in the sentences.

On second thought, Södertälje isn’t the most obvious place to start life anew. At least not for those who want that life to have anything Jewish about it. The prerequisites for Jewish life don’t exist in Södertälje. Jewish life demands a basic, minimum number of Jews, and in Södertälje that number is never to be reached. During the brief period when it might have been reached, the Jews in Södertälje have other things to think about than Jewish life, assuming they want to think about Jewish life at all. I sense that being Jewish is not something to make a big show of. Not in a place like this. When I tell the two of you that Mr. Winqvist always calls out “
Herein!
” in German when anybody knocks at the classroom door, you worry that I’ll think I know a bit of German and try it out on Mr. Winqvist, when what I possibly might know is a few words of Yiddish. I never let Mr. Winqvist find out that I know a few words of Yiddish. The Jewish elements of our life are toned down. On Friday evenings, Mom blesses the Sabbath candles with a gentle movement of her hand, and on the big Jewish holidays we go to Stockholm. At school I’m excused from Scripture lessons, but when I resist having to be the only exception in the school, there’s little opposition. On summer vacations I’m sent to a camp for Jewish children in the archipelago north of Stockholm that no doubt fulfills its educational purposes, but it’s far from clear what role Jewish life plays in the Project.

I don’t think it’s missing Jewish life that for so long makes you consider moving on. I think it’s the horizons of the Place that refuse to open up to you, in spite of the miracle apartment, and the truck factory, and the mapped-out future, and the daycare center, and Havsbadet, and the Child who’s supposed to make his world yours.

And in spite of Karin and Ingvar.

Ingvar’s the team leader in the pipe gang at the truck factory and a few years older than you; I’m not sure by what words and gestures you soon become friends, but very early on, hanging in the one-room apartment below the railroad station, there’s an oil painting by Ingvar—a vase of flowers. Karin and Ingvar are there before the Child. It’s Karin and Ingvar who suggest giving the Child a name that doesn’t stand out. Karin and Ingvar are there at the Child’s circumcision. “All those people who would soon spread around the world,” Karin writes, much later. “Nobody could speak Swedish. All the men wore hats.”

In what language do Karin and Ingvar become your friends? Not only your sole friends outside the refugee colony, but your best friends at that. You celebrate your first New Year’s Eve in Södertälje in their home. They’re the first to see your first curtains in your first apartment on Villagatan. You raise your first glasses in a toast to Karin and Ingvar’s firstborn child. You also serve coffee in your first glasses, since Ingvar doesn’t drink tea. Ten months later, when your firstborn is due to arrive, Ingvar comes along to the hospital, so that there will be no confusion of languages. After all, Ingvar has some experience by now, and he’s from the Place.

Confusion of languages is my term for the invisible wall rising up between you and the Place, not a wall between languages so much as a wall between worlds, between the world you carry with you and the world you hope to make your own; a wall that no language whatsoever can penetrate. After all, the words are there already—ghetto, death camp, gas chamber, annihilation, extermination—but nobody understands what they mean.

Insofar as they care what they mean.

It must be lonely to live in a place where nobody understands what the words mean, even though you take such pains with them.

Karin writes that you search among the books on their shelves and ask for Strindberg. She writes that you learn Swedish by reading Strindberg and that before long you can write “without spelling mistakes and completely grammatically.”

It’s certainly in the language of Strindberg that you study for your correspondence courses late into the night, in the hope that the horizon will open and the confusion of languages cease.

It’s also certain that as soon as the Child can add one letter to another on the living room floor, you come home carrying a briefcase heavy with library books. The Child’s early reading includes classics like
Children of the Forest
,
Hat Cottage
,
Cat Goes on a Journey
, and
Spotty
, about a rabbit who’s different from all the other rabbits; but also—and far too early—
Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan
, by Stefan Zweig.

Karin and Ingvar understand you better than most people, not because they understand more of your words but because they like you and want to understand you and want you to stay on so that your children can grow up together and you can all cycle out together to the little wooden summerhouse Ingvar has built out of spare packing cases from the truck factory.

The fact that you two hesitate for so long over whether to move on or not, I believe, has something to do with Karin and Ingvar.

On July 9, 1953, carrying two heavy suitcases, you board the train to Marseille via Copenhagen and Paris. You spend a few days in Paris, lugging the cases around. Your French is not on a
par with your Swedish, so when you happen to knock into someone on the sidewalk you say
S’il vous plaît
instead of
Excusezmoi
, which doesn’t go down very well. You immediately learn to say “sorry” and not “please.” Another sort of confusion of languages, for sure, and easier to sort out.

In Paris you also carry lists with names and addresses of people who might have known people who might have survived the world you come from.